


A Love Letter in a Landfill

by Frances



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 16:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7113676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frances/pseuds/Frances
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks at her with anxious misery on his face and she waits for him to kick her off the team, to wrap her in towels and bubble wrap and lay her gently in a vault. “Will you...” He starts and then tries again, picking up some momentum, “Will you please come stay with me, when you’re discharged?”<br/>Or: Felicity becomes the Oracle the same way Barbara Gordon did and Oliver actually manages to get over himself and help her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Love Letter in a Landfill

**Author's Note:**

> I never saw past the second season, so this is featured around there. Mostly I work on my novel and my paid EMS job these days, but this was still ridiculously fun. So thank you all for that.

Baby, I have no idea how this will end  
Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth’s hips  
And our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary  
Or maybe tomorrow, my absolute insanity  
Combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills  
Will leave us  
Like a love letter  
In a landfill  
But whatever  
Whenever  
However this ends,  
I want you to know, that right now,  
I love you forever  
I love you for the hardest mile we walked together.  
-Andrea Gibson,who teaches me how to love over and over again. 

 

He looks at her with anxious misery on his face and she waits for him to kick her off the team, to wrap her in towels and bubble wrap and lay her gently in a vault. “Will you...” He starts and then tries again, picking up some momentum, “Will you please come stay with me, when you’re discharged?”  
She gapes at him, mouth lolling open unattractively.   
Oliver, unsurprisingly, misinterprets her silence. “Please.” He repeats it, like it’s an spell. “Please.”

She hears the phone calls he gets at night and to her whatever the opposite of credit is it takes her two whole minutes to figure out who’s on the other end.  
“ I was dead and you were twelve. It was always different for you.”  
He pauses for a long time, letting her talk.  
“I’m never going to stop looking for you. No, you’re not keeping me up. Call whenever. And I mean that. If I’m not...Well, I’ll always pick up if I’m not.”  
Another moment of silence.  
“I love you anyway.” Those words in his voice are engaging in a way she has no desire to dissect. 

“Felicity.” He inhales and lets the air out again. Slowly. “Please, just answer the question. Try not to get too mad.”  
She tenses up. “Just spit it out, Oliver, did I ever tell you how nervous those dramatic pauses always made me?”  
“Would you feel better if he was dead?”  
“If you killed him? No.”  
“That’s not what I asked,” He corrected in that admonishing tone that makes her want to shake him like a postpartum mother with a newborn.  
“I think we both know it is. Thanks for asking, I guess, though not really. Don’t you dare do this for me. If killing him would...Well, it won’t, so don’t.”  
He is, for once, not shocked by her anger. “Okay.”  
“Promise.” She waves a shaky finger at him. He smiles softly for a moment, like someone who’s never murdered anyone, let alone for her.   
“I swear.” And, at the very least, he’s good for that. 

Initially, she needs help getting on and off of the toilet. Though he always departs for the critically embarrassing parts of this process, it’s still horrendous.   
One morning, he notices. “Do you want a nurse, instead?”  
She continues adjusting her grandma underwear in front of him. “For what?”  
“For,”and he gestures around, at her limp legs and the toilet and the bolted-down chair in the shower. “All this.”   
“God, sometimes but I don’t think I can handle that. I’m sorry. This is the worst and the most I’ve ever asked anyone for-”  
“Felicity. We already spend almost all our waking hours together. I don’t think this is going to be the change you think it is.”   
He’s both wrong and right about that.   
“You’d do the same for me.”  
“There’s no way I could lift you-”  
“You know what I mean,” he says, with a soft smile. “You would do the same and more, for me.”  
An indisputable truth, though she cannot state with any certainty that it would be for the right reasons. 

It’s fundamental. She forces herself to remember whenever she sits for hours trying to stand or eyes Diggle’s worn boots with unabashed envy. She opened the door. It was her.  
If she’d stayed crumpled in the doorway until the paramedics arrived with a backboard, it could have been just one more night of peril and a lengthy recovery period. Instead, she was born caring and dug in her elbows. She hauled her slack lower body over to Lance, leaving flecks of bloody skin around the edges of the kitchen tiles. She leaned up on her numb knees to press her hands into the damp hole burrowing into his pectoral, ignoring the way blood seeped through her fingers in time with his heartbeat. Felicity had stretched and twisted her own spinal cord and couldn’t even feel it.   
She remembers telling him over and over again. “I didn’t check. I just opened it.” and Quentin murmuring softly to her, for all that it should have been the other way around.   
Then again, he walked away from it all and Felicity will never walk away from anything again. 

The nurse pats her hand absently, eyes on the clock above the doorframe. “I’m going to go get the doctor. He has something to tell you.” She shuffles away apathetically, tugging her Kermit the Frog scrubs more securely over her hips.   
‘Something’ isn’t bad, it’s the worst. It is never change and no recovery. She asked for Oliver and Digg to stay while he says those words and they are treated to the sights, sounds, and textures of her totally numb breakdown.  
She tries to tell herself that at least it wasn’t brain damage, at least she kept her hands. She tries to tell them that she always hating jogging anyway but all that comes out is a soft, crumpled whimper. Digg holds her hand and Oliver can’t seem to look away from corpse feet tragically attached to a still living body. She is trapped inside a Frankenstein movie that never ends. 

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” He looks sideways at her, a habit he’s gotten into. She wonders if he can no longer handle her whole face all at once.  
“Oliver. What possible difference does one more violent crime make?”  
“This one? Everything. ”  
She smiles for no reason at all, her increasingly common reaction to these solemn vow-like sentences. “You all wouldn’t make it three hours without me.”  
“Probably not,” he allows. “But we’d make do. Drag someone else into this, maybe. Please don’t do this to yourself for us; you don’t have to.”  
“No, but I’m going to. Starting tomorrow.” She sighs and rubs her face. “This didn’t happen because of who I am to you.”  
“No,” Oliver allows, “It didn’t.”  
He hugs her gently and it’s exactly what she wants though certainly not what she needs. “I, we, just want you to be okay.”  
She wonders if it hurts him badly, bending himself against her need for comfort, if there will always be creases left. Is it like carrying a dozen brooms all at once or more like sitting in the room while your sister kisses her boyfriend. Felicity inhales to tell him that she doesn’t need him to change for her, not even for this but the words get stuck in her dry throat.   
This isn’t how she wanted to find out that he actually meant it when he said, “I would do anything to help you.”

He makes them tea, like some Jane Austen character or, more likely, someone who doesn’t know how to cook anything else.   
“I’m lucky I lived,” She tells him again. “If he’d hit five inches down or three inches up or...I’m lucky. Really.”  
“Not just you,” he says, adding some godawful combination of Chinese herbs that taste precisely like disappointment.  
“What?” She says, trying to ignore the increasingly pungent smell. Felicity knows she’ll refuse to drink it, knows that he’ll wait with the patience of boulders until she finally does.  
“It’s not just you,” he murmurs softly to the steam. “That got so lucky.”  
He repeats it in Chinese. 

He pretends like she still has her own decision-making power. Whenever she says, “I’m taking a shower,” he makes it happen. That’s one of the many things she loves him for though every god knows she is trying so hard not to keep a list.   
He watches TV with her, talks with Thea late into the night, trains for every other moment. He lives on the fund he was supposed to use to go to college and plans thoughtful, thrifty dinners for the pair of them. She hasn’t seen him sleep in weeks and wonders if he actually believes that willpower could ever beat his own chemistry.  
One crisp Saturday she wakes up to see him collapsed over the counter, face smushed unattractively into the edge of a spice rack. She swallows her screams until she can see that he breaths and snores and murmurs.  
Felicity calls Digg. “Do you think you can move him without waking him up?”  
Digg smiles down at her, like a benevolent God who you’d actually want to watch old movies with. “Most certainly.”  
It bothers her, that she can’t lift either of them. 

“Thea?” He asks softly, believing or at least pretending that Felicity sleeps through these phone calls.   
“Of course not,” He replies and then the voice on the other end is shrieking, a terrible and seemingly endless noise.  
Oliver waits it out patiently, doesn’t even move the phone away from his ear in case there’s some vital words in the cacophony. “Speedy,” He murmurs, “I’ll never hurt you. If I thought it would help, I would let you kill me.”  
Staticy, broken sobs.  
“I love you. Even if that’s the only true thing we’ve ever had between us. I just do.”  
Silence.  
“I wouldn’t stop if I could.”  
Felicity watches for him to fray. 

After four months, she tells herself that she will be who she was, that she will not be a burden beyond the physical and sometimes it works. She cries herself to sleep more quietly and only allows herself episodes of picturesque despondence when alone.  
Oliver lifts her into bed a week later, frowns at the lightness. “Felicity,” He begins but she rolls over, her back to him. She makes herself sleep through the phone ringing and the exhaustion in his tone when he picks it up and talks Thea down for the dozenth night in a row.   
The next day Digg comes and takes her out to the zoo, makes her sit still for facepaint and spends eight dollars on a balloon animal.  
“It’s not any better if I’m leaning on you instead,” She tells him through a mouthful of cotton candy, eyes aching at the color and cheeks from the effort of actually smiling.  
Digg chuckles down at her. “Do you really think there’s anything else I’d like to be doing more?”  
She cries just enough the the cat whiskers down her cheeks are obscured.  
“I’m not sure I could get through this, any of this, without you.”  
He hugs her tight enough to make her bones creak and he is so solid and comforting. “I hope you never need to.”  
“I wish you were my brother.” Felicity blurts out. “Oh god, I didn’t mean that like instead of your brother, you know, the one who’s dead.”  
“I do seem to recall that.” He finally chokes out and laughs and laughs.   
She can’t remember the last time he did that. 

“Bricks?” She inquires levelly as he grunts softly while hoisting up a box. “For me? Oliver, you shouldn’t have.” Felicity tries to say that the way she would’ve last year but it comes out like a bitter directive.  
He rips the box open with the blunt tips of his fingers and she wishes yet again that she was not so attracted to him. He offers her a 10-pound arm weight. “For strength,” He tells her.  
“I already have a physical therapist,” She tells him. “I’m working on it. I can almost...” But she can’t almost anything. She’s been half-assing and even skipping physical therapy for six weeks and she’d spent mornings jogging her whole life but has never been able to do a pull-up. This is all she has.   
“I know you do,” He says, and grins down. The next thing he takes out is a wide, shallow bowl. “But trust me,” And she does and can’t seem to stop. “My way is better.”   
Within twenty minutes her arms are dangling slabs of meat and Oliver actually whistles while he lifts her into bed. 

Unprecedented: Oliver stops working out for a moment and walks over to Felicity for the apparent purpose of dripping sweat on her.  
“What is all of this?”  
“Cross-referencing men with a stalking history and recent code ambers at the local neonatal facilities. Those two combined should give us a pretty short list.”  
Oliver hesitates. “Last year, it took you fourteen hours just to access the state police database.”  
“Sure did,” Felicity agrees. “But only because I am extremely talented. And I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been there.”  
“Are you being less...careful this time?”  
“Nope,” She takes a long, luxurious sip of a berry smoothie he’d gotten her on his way over. “More so.”  
Assuming, reasonably, that this whole thing was a lead-up to a criticism she followed with. “No one will ever find this place by following me, Oliver.”  
“I know,” He replies absently. “You got into five hospital databases and a federal offender one in five hours. You’ve gotten a lot better, Felicity.”  
Last year, she would have treasured all of these observations and even more so this compliment that proves that he pays attention, that he notices what she gives up. She frowns into an un crushed ice cube in her drink.  
“I don’t do anything else anymore. Ever.”  
The next day he invites her to the park and it’s all she can do to refuse politely. 

She skips a day with the fucking water slapping bowl and of course he notices. It could be a knock-down drag out fight if he would just yell back. Felicity bellows at him.“Is all of this penance to you, Oliver? Is it somehow your fault that someone wanted to murder a cop within five feet of me? How exactly is this one all about how awful you were or are or...whatever!”  
“If you don’t do it every day, it isn’t going to work.” He replies patiently, sitting like a cross-legged statue.   
“Why are you taking care of me like this?” She hasn’t bellowed like this since she was a teenger and spends an ugly moment relishing the right to behave however she likes, to wear her damage like a badge. “Why?”  
“Honestly?” He asks, an incongruous smile growing on his face.  
“Yes, Oliver.” She grits out. She’ll apologize in the morning and wear her embarrassment like a shroud but that is still hours away. “Honestly.”  
“I thought if I didn’t offer you might move in with Barry instead.”  
She storms off with a mutter, regretting that she can’t stomp her feet. 

Digg starts knocking on the door, audibly scoffs at himself and walks straight in. “Felicity!” He calls up the ramp. “You’re pretty enough, let’s get moving.”  
Two loud thumps and some swearing.  
She hears him pacing downstairs “You don’t have to do this.”  
Digg sighs with everything but noise at that. “We’re going to spend the afternoon together. Sometimes people need a break.”  
“I don’t need a break.”  
“No, you don’t. Don’t come with. Do something else.”  
Oliver opens his mouth to protest and shuts it again, mutters something that sounds a lot like “stupid.” “I just didn’t think.” He says.  
“What a shock,” drawls Diggle and evades the friendly cuff. “But I don’t think there’s any real harm done. Just be careful, okay?”  
Felicity pretends that she didn’t heart them say any of that and it becomes one of the smaller lies among them. 

 

“Felicity, what are you talking about?” Gaping at this oddity, this request for more words she nevertheless plows on.  
“Oliver. Let’s be real. No, don’t interrupt me. Not that my dating life was exactly what I hoped it would be when I was 14 before this happened, but now no one will ever want me. Ever. I’ll show up for a first date with a guy, he’ll pretend to not be surprised and then will be excruciatingly polite and never call me back. That is my future.”  
“Felicity-” He tries again.  
She chuckled. “Being with me means bedsores on my legs, helping me shower but not in a sexy way, a one floor house, not to mention the doorbell hysterics and years of therapy I am going to need because I am not you or Digg and I can’t just brush this stuff off.”  
“Being with you would mean that,” he agrees. “But also a lot of other things. And anyone that doesn’t see why...He wouldn’t deserve you anyway.”  
“The only good part of being with me would be the parking spaces.”  
“Felicity,” he chides and she inhales and tries again.  
“That’s sweet, Oliver. It really is. But since this has nothing to do with murder or abs, I am totally comfortable saying you have no idea what you’re talking about.”  
“Maybe,” he allows.   
“Not maybe. It is physically impossible to hoist someone on and off the toilet and still be sexually attracted to them. It’s fine.”  
“That’s not true,” Oliver argues. He dips his head, like a nervous schoolboy. She wants to lean up and kiss him but she physically can’t and anyway, she can’t give him up and especially not for something that stupid. He changes the subject. “Anyway, what you said earlier, the last thing I want is for you to be like me and Digg. The last thing either of us want.”  
“That’s sweet, Oliver. It is.”  
She keeps herself from adding that it may be what she needs.

It sneaks up on her. She turns red lights green for them and with another flick of the wrist erases any record of it. She accesses bank accounts and bastards their enemies hoped everyone had forgotten about. Computers talk to her in a way they never used to, and put bluntly, that’s saying a lot.  
“Actually, Oliver,” She tells him through a mouthful of baklava, “We should grab him on his commute.” Felicity explains why in efficient short sentences uttered between other keystrokes.  
She’s in the process of opening the PowerPoint presentation she made for this occasion when she finally manages to look up at him.   
“Sounds good,” he says casually, like there was not just a tectonic shift in the way this team functions. He clasps her neck while he says, “Great work, Felicity.”  
Digg continues the baffling direction this conversation has taken. “I don’t think we’ve fallen in a bad ambush in nearly six months.”  
Oliver smiles softly down at her, unthreatened and proud. “The only thing that’s changed in that time is you.”  
No one ever beats her anymore. Not here. 

Except this time.   
A smear of blood drips down the side of his mouth. He’s putting pressure on his own leg. “No,” he mutters when he sees her. “She can’t be here for this. Don’t let her see, don’t let her...”  
It’s the worst thing she’s ever heard him say. The blood is bubbling out through his fingers. Felicity wheels herself over, uses her constantly sore but still muscular arms to a clotting pad against it. It’s bad. She would say it was the worst, but that superlative keeps finding a new low. She would also joke that it looks like someone took a flail to his leg, but she’s pretty sure that’s exactly what happened.   
His phone rings and he forgets, leans over to reach for it. Digg swears at him to sit his bloody ass back down but picks it up for him anyway. Oliver seizes it with hands already crusting over. “Thea,” he breathes, softly.  
The tinny voice sounds totally calm and Oliver’s entire body goes stiff.   
“Two hours.” He tells her, sighing tiredly. “When I said no matter what I meant it.” He visibly composes himself, letting blood run over his eyes without flinching.” How’s the bleeding?”  
“Slowing,” Felicity murmurs.  
“You should be at home,” he tells her.  
“What happens in two hours?”  
“Thea says that Merlin found out that we’ve been talking, that she’s getting out before he...that she’s getting out and wants me to come get her.”  
“Trap,” Digg says flatly, without inflection. “No way she has a change of heart the day you just happen to hurt yourself worst this year.”  
Oliver tries to sigh again, but only manages a gurgle. “Of course it is. But I’m all she has now.”  
“And we’re still going.” Finishes Felicity.   
Digg huffs a laugh and almost chokes on it. “Of course we are.” He reaches for the hood. Oliver lungs to stop him but the climax of that movement is a tiny whimper.  
“I’ll call Barry,” whispers Felicity and Oliver scowls through a sheet-white and sweaty face.  
“They’ll see this coming.” He sighs.  
“Maybe,” answers Felicity and that’s all the certainly they’ll ever get. 

 

Felicity knows that this evening ends in medical charts. Either Oliver choking on blood mixed with lung fluid, Digg trying to hold two folds of skin back together, or, preferably, Merlin’s medium rare corpse. The things she’s seen, and in her case things has really earned the vagueness of the noun, make it easier and honestly less affecting to vividly imagine the worst. It just can’t seem to stop happening. Felicity scopes out the meeting spot, wrangles security cameras into eyes, nearly cries when she can’t reach the top shelf in the van.  
Oliver hugs her before she goes, like he’s two seconds away from hoisting her into a fireman’s carry. He’s the best thing in her constantly narrowing world.

Barry gets shot with an arrow. Not Oliver’s, though in his more unstable moments and her most honest ones Felicity knows that it’s possible and why. His skin heals, clinging to the shaft again and again.   
Digg tries again to gouge away flesh fast enough to yank the damn thing out. They use every drop of morphine in the cave and it’s not close to enough.   
Oliver vanishes breifly around 3 am to meet with the family shrink (of course drawls Digg, even as he loads Barry up with even more drugs) and it’s understood that Felicity goes with him. They talk in quiet voices and near yelling and fifteen minutes after their done a cult de-programmer arrives at the Queen mansion, willing enough to accept a lurid story of a troubled girl making all the wrong choices and her rightful guardian paying to set her right..  
The fissures and shatter-lines of the beleaguered Queens are as visible as a goddamn needle to the eye.  
Felicity wonders if the bad things that happen to you add up and multiply and shatter you like dry wall or if every time you bounce back just a little faster, if scar tissue doesn’t bleed so much. It’s not the first time. 

He deposits Detective Lance with Thea, begging him not to let her leave again, trying to explain that he is running very low on people he trusts.  
“Are you trying to tell me that you have somewhere more important to be than here?” Lance asks, something between judgement and sympathy in his ton, apparently trying to fit in yet another woman Oliver has let down into his worldview.   
Oliver stares at him and says, “Please” at the same time Felicity grunts, “Lance, you owe me.”  
“She reminds me of Sara,” he tells them, sighing, an obvious agreement.   
The Foundy is still full of screams. Oliver shoves something crusty and green in Barry’s mouth and chokes him out with the other hand.   
Felicity watches so carefully. There’s no glimmer of joy, no satisfaction, just a man resigned to pain, if not his own than that of the people to whom he owes everything.  
She understands in a way she didn’t before that she loves him. 

“I owe you one.”  
“Just one?” Barry smiles tiredly, still reeling from pain.  
“Anything. Ever.” says Oliver.  
“Are we positive he’s dead? I’ve had some trouble myself in that direction.”  
Digg chuckles through a fistful of someone else’s flesh, tipping it into a bag like he’s about to weigh it for Shylock. “Beyond positive.” 

A long sweet year full of illegal fireworks in July and Oliver’s charcoal-like attempt at homemade cookies during game night passes. Digg has his baby and Thea is not allowed to be alone with her. Oliver takes her to concerts and the aquarium, they spend the night end babysitting so their best friend can get “Some goddamn sleep, just one night, please.”He buys them tickets to the convention and strokes her hair when the realization that Professor X is her only viable costume option reduces her to actual, childlike tears.  
Once they get there, Oliver asks her what she’s so very happy about.  
“Guess.”  
He peruses the schedule. “The four o’clock meet and greet with Nathan Fillion?”  
“Whatever, more importantly-” She tries to explain to him about the ticket checker, who was showered and reasonably hot, had stared at her in a way that had clearly suggested he was considering logistics rather than second guessing how to talk to her.   
“Surely you get that every day.” Oliver mentions, off-handed.  
“Um, no.” Felicity retorts. “Things I get every day include your judgement and the strong urge-”  
Oliver interrupts her and she inhales to tell him how rude that is. “Trust me, you get that every day. You just don’t notice.”  
She replays that conversation. “Did you say Nathan Fillion is physically here? In this building?”  
Felicity squeals and throws her arms around him

“It just went dark in there and I’m not--”  
“Metaphorically?” She asks calmly, stroking the weight of a baton on the handle of the wheelchair.  
“Yes-” Roy sputters. “I think it grabbed him-”  
“Grab a wall,” she tells him and it goes dark, literally this time.   
“How did you even-”  
“Forward forty steps. Count out loud. Second door on the right, Digg is the man in the Northeast corner. Three armed hostiles. The monster is the one closest to the door, but he was a human very recently.”  
He stumbles forward, counting out loud. Felicity makes the loudspeakers in the building tell the monster where he can watch the stream of his kid mother’s live burial if he doesn’t vacate the premise within thirty seconds. Every phone flickers, alternating between pictures of children, estranged sisters and high school exes whose Facebooks they check every morning, and gruesomely, medically maimed bodies. The only number their phones can dial is the phone sex hotline where the kid sister of Richard, the largest and most experienced one, works. They receive increasingly frantic bank notifications.   
Roy arrives at a very nearly empty room.   
Felicity revels in this, the drunken feeling of saving someone’s life, with her own hands. Roy calls her scary but still watches Chopped with her when he gets back to the Foundry. Digg claps her on the back and asks if he can join them, his faith in her loyalty unwavered.  
She smiles until she goes to sleep. 

He asks if she’s sure. Even though she’s trying to remove his pants from his body and the condom from its wrapper at the same time. Even though she’s been pushing this for weeks and weeks, sitting closer and smiling longer and thoroughly neglecting her online dating profile. Even though she can honestly say there is probably not a point in their friendship when she would have turned him down.  
He asks again, softly, not moving, apparently deciding that there are things worse than a murderer and he will not be that, at least. Oliver asks the sight of her regret in the morning may actually kill him.  
She looks up at him, the very top of the condom dangling damply from her lips so that she can finally deal with his stupid buckle. “What?”   
He laughs and laughs and carries her up to his bed.  
A little later, she finally manages. “Positive. I’m positive.”

“Thea.” She murmurs, trying to decide if it’s a greeting or a question. She didn’t hear the girl come in because her footsteps made no sounds. She feels for her weighted baton with the very tips of her fingers.  
“Felicity,” the shorter girl replies, sounding tired and reassuring not like someone whose programming kicked back in at the worst possible moment. “Since there hasn’t been any backsliding in eight months or so I’m allowed down here now.”  
Thea watches Felicity check for a weapon and briefly stroke the panic button that’s right at her thumb and sighs wearily. “You know what I missed most while I was with Merlin?”  
“Critical thinking?” Felicity offers without thinking and then cringes.  
The younger girl laughs, sounding for a second less withered. “And antibiotics.”   
Felicity has become an expert in their faces the moment they notice the chair. Thea’s eyes widen slightly and she offers a simple, “Oh.” She looks like she may cry, an incongruous reaction.   
“Oliver didn’t mention it?”  
“Nope,” says Thea popping the P.  
“Why did you think we’d moved in together?”  
“Superhero stuff? Don’t get me wrong, he talks about you constantly and mentioned that you’d been having some medical problems but I was thinking more a breast lump than...all this.”  
“No, I get by okay on my own these days but at first I needed...Anyway. He felt guilty and you know the rest.”  
“Indeed,” says Thea and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Did my bio dad-”  
“No.” Felicity says. “It was just some guy that Detective Lance had busted for spousal abuse.”  
Thea looks heinously relieved and takes a few deep breaths. Felicity understands what someone looks like when they’re reassembling themselves and leaves her to it.   
When her breathing slows done, Felicity finally speaks. “You never did say what you missed the most while you were mind whammied.”  
“Project Runway.”  
Felicity smiles hugely at her and switches her monitor over to the larger screen.


End file.
